Reading the lovely blog of Cati Vaucelle, i discovered the work of Kate James. Kate is a second year graduate student in the Visual Arts Program at MIT. After having studied dance/kinesthesia and architectural history at Brown University, she did a Master of Architecture at MIT before transferring into the Visual Arts program.

Her design, fashion, performative, video and space projects focus on the body, its habits, movements, and the dynamic sectional relationship to its surrounding structures. They have this wonderful mix of quirkiness and deep relevance to the issues she investigates.

You have a background in both dance/choreography and architecture. How does your knowledge of the body and its dynamics feeds your thoughts and creativity in architecture? How do you make these two seemingly different fields meet?

I started studying dance and architecture at the same time, during my first year as an undergraduate. Maybe because of that, my understanding of architecture has always been rooted in the body. I think of architecture as a built echo of body itself: corporeal issues of public/ private, structural systems, skins, orifice and interface all resound in architecture.

Now, I often site my art practice between the body and its surrounding structures. This dynamic negative space houses habitual life and cultural inscription, and is therefore subject to interrogation through artistic intervention.

Your MIT page says that your work attempts to "question and complicate the interfaces between the corporeal and the environmental". In a time when most designers talk about "making it simple", why do you think it is important to "complicate"? Which form does this complication take?

I guess by 'complicate' I mean to acknowledge and engage with the complexity of the interfaces already in play. We so easily naturalize our interactions and surroundings, ignoring the layers of choreography imposed on the everyday. By tweaking and reframing the everyday relations between the body and its environment, my work refutes the source and nature of that everyday ritual.

I was very intrigued by the atHABITat costumes. There is one for vacuuming, one for serving food and a third one for putting away the dishes.
What was the inspiration for them?
Can you describe us what they are about and how each of them should be used?

The atHABITat costumes are about a contemporary vision of the woman in the home, and a need to multi-task and overlap the upkeep habits of the body and the home. They are costumes worn to augment the household maintenance task, transforming it into an iso-kinetic exercise. Each costume records and accentuates the ergonomics of the activity.

In one, resistance band connects the vacuum wand to the wearer, intensifying the sweeping motion of the vacuuming. The 'putting away dishes' costume attaches a similar resistance band between the dishwasher and the wearer's vinyl gloves. In the 'serving food' costume, bands run through an oven mitt corset piece to accentuate the tension in the serving motion.

Once you have an idea for a project how do you push it forward and bring it to life? Do you test the idea on other people? Ask for feedbacks? Get depressed because it is technologically impossible to prototype it? What is the path that leads from idea to working prototype?

I would say the process goes like this: dream, doodle, make, discuss, research, make more, research more, discuss, display.

In terms of the making, I'm not a pre-planning type. I design and make things in one fluid mess of a step, whether this involves sewing, welding, or performing. The concept and research frame are usually fixed, but the work formally develops in an organic way as it goes along.

My biggest frustration is usually the scope of the projects compared to my personal capabilities. Because my work is very much about self-production, and because of the flow of my design process, I am committed to be involved with the craft and production of my costumes and props. But this production can involve 200 pounds of steel to weld or 60 hours of hand-sewing on a particular project.


Kate's working space

The garments you create are very well-designed. But do they function purely as accessories for performances or could you imagine everyday people wearing a modified version of them?

When I make costumes, they aren't intended as prototypes for products. They are very individuated, for one thing, designed specifically for my own home and body(both formally and functionally).

The costumes are an integral part of my performance practice. They are there to suggest that there is a latent potential for self-production in the scene of the everyday, and to transform actions into performances.

What was the inspiration for Dressails?

As a dancer, I was fascinated with falling. I studied how to fall, and tested gravity all the time.

I also sailed a lot when I was younger. I was terrified of, and in love with, especially strong winds that would tip the boat up on its edge and press hard on the sail.

I thought about this moment of negotiation between the control of the boat and the natural force of the wind. I wanted to give over some control of my body's movements to the wind in the same way, and used clothing design to achieve that. The dresses cause the wearer's body to teeter, spin, and lean, to be engaged with a natural and sporadic force a way that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Could you tell us about some of your recent projects?

One thing I'm working on in an ongoing way is a series of videos about my (7) vacuum cleaners. One piece involves assessing the manual instruction versus reality of use. Another documents a normal vacuuming session that turns into a full-on wrestling bout with the machine.

I also made some wearable trampolines last year, and performed with them in a piece called 'Six Corners'. There is a dynamic relationship between the body and the material and weight of the skirts. They are meant to discuss movement pattern, issues of personal boundaries, and body extension.

Which artists or designer do you find most inspiring and why?

Artists whose work I look most often at include Rebecca Horn, Martha Rosler, Bruce Nauman, Miranda July, Joan Jonas (who is my thesis advisor, which is an amazing privilege), Nina Yuen.

More and more I find myself looking at dancers/ choreographers who make art, especially Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Ann Carlson.

I look at screen stars as well, those who use their bodies to tell stories: Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the cast of Three's Company.

Any upcoming projects you could share with us?

I'm working on a project right now in conjunction with my thesis (titled 'homebody'). I'm making more home maintenance costumes and associated performances. So far, I've made a video of a phone conversation I had with my mortgage agent while wearing/using a dress constructed of Swiffer rosettes.

A last one: what is your relationship with fashion?

As an artist, I certainly engage with fashion. By this I mean that I think closely about how the body is clad, and how clothing can inform the body and vice-versa. Fashion becomes a key interface in the investigation of the body in the environment.

In terms of performance and the impact of costuming, fashion offers a fantastic bank of codified aesthetics, which can be drawn from for conceptual and phenomenal meaning.

Thanks Katherine!

Nice, nice. I've lost my connecting flight and now i'm stuck in Madrid Barajas waiting for the next flight to Sevilla. It's an 8 hour wait but i'm on my way to ZEMOS98 so i am still cheerful.

Anyway, gives me plenty of time to catch up with the emails and the long overdue posts. So back to New York where i was a few days ago and the Exit Art gallery. I'm still wondering how this place managed to escape my radar so far.

Until April 19 they are running a fascinating exhibition on artistic explorations of the current advancements in neurological research. The works shown in BRAINWAVE: Common Senses encourage visitors to consider the brain not only as the center of human activity but as a site for interpretation, for scientific and philosophical debates, for examining our relationship to the world - and for questioning our common sense.

I am usually not very excited by media art works which engage with the little grey cells. Blame it on the BrainBar, when i discovered it i somehow felt that had seen it all. Well, maybe not... I went to Exit Art to see Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns' robot that "plays back dreams" which was twice as fantastic as i expected but i also discovered 2 or 3 outstanding works.

Suzanne Anker's fascinating and elegant The Butterfly in the Brain uses three-dimensional Rorschach inkblot tests, brain scans and images of butterfly wings to explores the imagery of the symmetrical (or virtually symmetrical) structures of butterflies, the brain, and chromosomes.

I somehow can't get the black hovering butterfly bat she painted on the wall out of my mind. "By taking the butterfly bat image out of a textbook, scaling it up to a large size, and putting it in a site-specific environment, one turns the image into an entirely new and other kind of affective entity," she explained.

Suzanne Anker, The Sum of All Fears (detail). Image courtesy of the Exit Art gallery

Although the use of Rorschach inkblots is controversial in psychology, the images are widely recognized among the public.

Crab, 2005

Anker used a computer program to convert an inkblot into 3D structure so intricate they could probably not be re-created using traditional sculpture. After which a machine produces the object using plaster and resin. "Looking in 3-D," Anker argued, "one begins to assess new meanings: bones, sea creatures, body parts. These are surrogates for the imagination itself, opening up a dialog between the mind and body. What happens when you can pick up a psychology test in your hand? The mind essentially has been embodied."

Gossipers, 2005 (more images)

She also transposed butterfly wings onto MRI scans, drawing a parallel between genetic patterns in nature and advanced imaging technologies. Like constellations in the sky, butterfly shapes may be found in neurological maps as well as charts of urban sprawl.

Suzanne Anker, MRI Butterfly (detail). Image courtesy of the Exit Art gallery

Another work i found really moving and riveting was a video installation by Phil Buehler, a photographer, fascinated by "haunted ruins" of abandoned Psychiatric Hospitals.

Buehler, Windows of the Soul. Image courtesy of the Exit Art gallery

Windows of the Soul, asks whether or not one can read madness in another's eyes. 300 b&w mug shot photographs of mental patients, taken in the '50s when they were admitted in the hospital. The eyes of the individuals are projected on a canvas hanging from the ceiling. The rest of the face lays on the floor. Every 5 seconds, another pair of eyes and a face take their place on the split screen. Riveting and disturbing.

Dustin Wenzel's brass sculptures are brain-cavity castings of Great Whales from the New Brunswick Museum collection.

Dustin Wenzel, (front) Sperm Whale Endocranial Cast, (back) Right Whale Endocranial Cast. Image courtesy of Exit Art Gallery

It has recently been discovered that some humpback whales have spindle neurons, a type of brain cell previously considered to exist only in dolphins, humans and other primates, which may indicate a high capacity for intelligence. Although white males possess the largest physical brain of any animals (Wenzel's castings were indeed impressively big), there is no scientific consensus about the nature, magnitude or even existence of cetacean intelligence.

And now for the gizmos:

Jamie O'Shea, Alvin (image courtesy of Exit Art gallery)

Artificial neural networks are often used in voice recognition systems and IA research. They consist in mathematical computations that mimic the neural network patterns of the nervous system. Jamie O'Shea's Alvin is a realization of an interactive and electronic neural network constructed with physical hardware. When left alone Alvin is dormant, but if you the lay your hand on the interface provided, you will set an electronic neural-like network in motion.

Alvin is a cellular automaton organized around eight cells which produce sound. The sound one cell produces is determined by what sound the other cells are making. This interrelated input and output scheme is an artificial neural network; a simulation of a brain. The imitation of life goes even further, because Alvin's sound circuits are built and destroyed by one another, rather than just turned on or off.

Swarm, by David Bowen (whom i interviewed a year ago), is an autonomous roaming device whose movements are determined by houseflies housed inside the device itself.

David Bowen, Swarm (detail). Image courtesy of Exit Art Gallery

The chamber where they live contains food, water and light to keep them warm but also sensors that detect the changing light patterns produced by their movements. The sensors send the light data to an on-board microcontroller, which in turn activate the motors moving the device in relation to the movements of the flies.

David Bowen, Swarm. Image courtesy of Exit Art Gallery

Oh, look! i took all those little images.

BRAINWAVE: Common Senses is on view until April 19, 2008 at Exit Art Gallery in New York. This exhibition is part of Exit Art's Unknown Territories series of exhibitions that explore the impact of scientific advances on contemporary culture and examine in particular how contemporary artists interpret and interact with the new knowledge and possibilities created by technological innovation in the 21st century.

Sensorium. Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, Director, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art and Professor of the History of Art at MIT (Amazon UK and USA)

Publisher MIT Press says:The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in "controlled schizophrenia" and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and François Roche's destabilized architecture. (...) Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on "The Mediated Sensorium" by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." (...) Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually.

The book is actually the catalog of an exhibition of the same name which was curated by by Bill Arning, Jane Farver, Yuko Hasegawa, Marjory Jacobson and Caroline A. Jones in 2006 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Installation view: Sensorium Part I

Sensorium explores the ways artists address the physical and emotional aspects of our increasing engagement with technology. I missed the exhibition so i found it a bit difficult to engage with the chapter that focuses on the show. Nevertheless i found the book extremely engaging and caught myself adding loads of notes in the margins of the pages or underlying sentences i didn't want to forget. Starting at page 2 of the book: "The only way to produce a techno-culture of debate at the speed of technological innovation itself is to take up these technologies in the service of aesthetics. Aesthetic contemplation buys us time and space." Not bad for a start.

Janet Cardiff and George Burns Miller, Opera For A Small Room, interior, 2005. Photo by Markus Tretter

After an essay by Jones on "The Mediated Sensorium", the book includes curatorial essays and artists statements on each works participating to the Sensorium exhibition. Artists includes Mathieu Briand, Yuko Hasegawa, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Ryoji Ikeda, Bruce Nauman, Sissel Tolaas, etc. But also François Roche and R&Sie(n) which means that i have to contradict the statement above about my lack of interest for an exhibition i have not seen.

In his contribution to the exhibition, R&Sie(n) introduced the notion of repulsion and taboo in architecture by proposing the Mi(pi) Bar. Meant to look like a "physical secretion" from I.M. Pei's Wiesner Building where the Visual Arts Center List resides. Mi(pi) Bar is in fact a tearoom in which people drink tea made using their own recycled urine. The outer shape of the tea room is based on the forms of bubbles produced in urination.

The project was never executed but it certainly sparkled some debate. Will knowledge of the tea origin create repulsion, paranoia? Will it change how water seems to taste? After all, rumor has it that from 2009, astronauts will drink their own urine, sweat, and even rat pee recycled and purified by a high-tech machine. In her essay about the project Jane Farver recalls that although clean water is a readily commodity on the MIT campus, it comes at a great expense as the majority of the state's lakes, rivers and estuaries have pollution problems.

The chapter worth its weight in gold is the Abecedarium, a series of 36 essays which will bring you from the most mundane (an essay on the yuck factor!) to the most unexpected (Turner's paintings) entries to a re-thinking of our sensory relationship with technology.

Image discover magazine

Starting with "Air" where Bruno Latour explains how WW1 soldiers realized that air shouldn't be taken for granted when chlorine gas was thrown at them in Ypres; Michael Bull writes about society's ipodization in "auditory"; Caroline Jones investigates the increasingly porous boundaries between the biological and the mechanical in "biomimetics"; Chris Csikszentmihalyi draws our attention to the central role that "Control" plays in technology; in "Corpus" Stephen Wilson campaigns for the involvement of art in biological research; Constance Classen wrote a fascinating study on the odor of sanctity; i discovered the "Godscans" in Peter Lunenfeld'd essay about Andrew Newberg's affirmation that he had uncovered some evidence of the "biology of belief"; Caroline Bassett wrote about how identity theft is giving rise to governmental claims that we need a digital shadow to match our physical bodies; Peter Galison's "Nanofacture" essay mentions the dimension that art can take in nanotechnology; William J. Mitchell has a fascinating text on the role of camera phones in the development of a new panopticon of networked consumer electronics; Sherry Turkle explores the way mobile phones transport us to the state of a new ether and have given rise to the tethered self; Iroko Kikuchi recalls the culinary and cultural importance in Japan of the umami (the "fifth taste"), etc.

Sensorium is not one of those easy-to-review and flaunt-it-on-your-livingroom-table glossy volumes that you flip through more than you read. It's solid, it has depth, historical knowledge and a 360 degrees perspective of what notions related to "embodied technology and the technologized body" mean and involve.

More images of the exhibition.

Image on the homepage: Sissel Tolaas whose contribution to Sensorium was an to embed synthesized human sweat pheromones into the white paint on the gallery's walls in order to give visitor an idea of what the "smell of fear" is.

Consolation prize for everyone who missed the sk-interface conference. The videos of the talks -which took place at FACT in Liverpool on February 8 & 9 as part of the sk-interfaces exhibition - have been made available online. Yeah!

Culture de Peaux d'Artistes by Art Oriente Objet

I'm quoting curator Jens Hauser:

This international conference examined the aesthetic, philosophical and biomedical issues raised in the exhibition. Specialists from a wide range of disciplines and artists of international renown discussed past and future roles of skin, shifts in the concept of interfaces, the emergence of 'biofacts' in philosophy, as well as the most contemporary practices of artists using new technologies, biomedia and their own bodies.

Make your way to the FACT archive.

In the order of the conference schedule: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4.

The archive also includes footage of the performance Bleu Remix by Yann Marussich, recorded on the opening night of sk-interfaces.

Videos are encoded in H.264 format - you need a recent Flash player.

There's a also a great catalog with essays, interviews and project presentations: Sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders - Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society (Amazon USA and UK.)

Found on the flickr sets for unofficial 'favorite photos' of the staff of the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington DC: set 1, 2 and 3.

Orthopedics; feet of Chinese woman, bound, compared with tea cup and American woman's shoe. World War 1 era

See also: Four x-ray views of footbinding, ca. 1948

Rhinoplasty. Loss of nose due to an injury, and replacement by a finger in 1880. Surgery by Dr. E. Hart, photo by OG Mason, both of Bellevue Hospital, NY

Ambulance drill. Four litters loaded. World War 1

On the homepage: Masks worn during experiments with Plague. Philippines, probably around 1912.

Via morbid anatomy.

Last month, i went to Florence to visit Emotional Systems, the inaugural exhibition of the brand new Strozzina.

You're going to hear about the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS) in the coming months i'm sure. The space was created as platform for the different approaches and practices that characterise the production of contemporary art and culture. That doesn't seem much but in a city like Florence which lives and breathes Renaissance there was very little space left for contemporary art so far. Its Project Director Franziska Nori is a curator of new media art (she co-produced and curated produced exhibitions such as I Love You exploring the worlds of hackers and viruses, adonnaM.mp3 devoted to p2p and file-sharing, Digital Origami about the demo scene.) CCCS is not a digital art center though but its mission is to highlight all forms of contemporary culture and this includes media art.

Just to wet your appetite, CCCS's next exhibition CINA CINA CINA !!! will present the work of 15 contemporary Chinese artists whose artistic practice searches for an independent cultural identity free of the restrictive rules of the global market. It opens on March 21 and closes on May 4.

Palazzo Strozzi (image)

The exhibition space is located in the recently restored spaces under the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, an impressive don't-mess-with-me palace in Florence. Its construction begun in 1489 by Benedetto da Maiano, for banker and statesman Filippo Strozzi the Elder, a rival of the Medici who wanted the most magnificent palace as a political statement of his own status. Filippo Strozzi died in 1491, long before the construction's completion in 1538. Duke Cosimo I de Medici confiscated it in the same year, not returning it to the Strozzi family until thirty years later.

The exhibition that launched the center was Emotional Systems - Contemporary Art between Emotion and Reason. Curated by Franziska Nori and phenomenologist Martin Steinhoff, the show invited the audience to reflect on the relationship between the contemporary artist, the artwork and the viewer, in the light of the latest discoveries in the neurological sciences about the human brain and its effects on the emotions.

Christian Nold, Emotional Mapping Greenwich, 2005

Each room of the Strozzina is devoted to one artist, each focusing on different aspect of emotion and empathy with the public. All of them are perfectly documented on the exhibition website, but here's a selection:

Teresa Margolles, Aire, 2003

Teresa Margolles' installation takes you by the guts. The strategy of Air/Aire is as minimalistic as it is powerful, it calls for the immediate reality of experience rather than the power of representation, the whole experience is paradoxicaly triggered not by an image but an absence.

You enter the installation room through a transparent plastic curtain, the kind that you'd expect to find in the workshop of a butcher. The room is completely white and apparently empty apart from a working air-conditioning unit. The air is slightly humidified.

That's it, so you either pass your way thinking that it is just an empty room or spot the exhibition label and start to read the elements used in making the installation: the conditioning system and vaporised water.

Image from an other work of the artist: Muerte sin fin

As a visceral motor reaction, disgust is included together with fear and pain among the primary emotions pinpointed by Italian neuroscientist Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti as underlying the so-called "mirror mechanism".

The active agents of this mechanism are the mirror neurons in the brain, a particular class of neurons characterized by the property of firing not only when the individual performs a particular action but also when he or she sees or simply hears someone else perform it. In short, when someone observes a work of art, this triggers a sort of re-creation in the sense that the viewer does not remain passive but projects his or her 'inner state' onto it.

A good example of this emotional transfer is Bill Viola's video series The Passions in which everyday people perform scenes from the classic Christian iconography. The figures are extrapolated from religious symbology and re-contextualized in a timeless and universally poetic dimension as a metaphor of the essence of the human condition.

Bill Viola, Observance, 2002. Photo credit Kira Perov

Observance draws inspiration from Albrecht Dürer's The Four Apostles (1526), a pair of altar wings depicting the grief shared by the four apostles over the death of Christ. It has sometimes been said that the work can be taken partly as a response to September 11. Actors enter and exit the performance space with their eyes fixed on a set point that remains hidden but seem to be located in the spectator's space.

Although we are not permitted to see the cause of the performers grief, we can guess that death and loss are the reason for their emotion. It's hard not to think of 9/11. The entire action unfolds in silence and extreme slow motion.

The third work i'd like to highlight is Nomadic Time, an installation, devised by Andrea Ferrara, a.k.a. Ongakuaw, which involves the connecting of a performer to a machine that detects her brainwaves.

The device monitors four types of waves generated by the human brain:

alpha waves which come from the subconscious mind and are generated primarily by the region of the memory, upon which the subconscious is based; beta waves which are born in the conscious mind, and are related to all activities during the awake state when the person is concentrated on external stimuli; theta waves which constitute waves of psychical power together with delta waves; gamma waves which are those of the deep psychical powers, like those of a medium in a trance.

While the performer is closed in the cage like a laboratory animal. She is made to watch a video,while her emotional response in the form of waves emitted by the brain is recorded, codified and digitally sampled by computer.

The video sequence shows 257 still shots of a tree by the River Arno, photographed by the artist in the course of the year.

The number of these shots corresponds to the number of days that Ferrara was actually on the spot to photograph the tree. The days when he could not make it are symbolized by single black image that appears for a fraction of a second on the screen and have only a subliminal impact on the spectator. This absence is also represented by the absence of the performer in the moments when the performance is suspended, leaving just the objects in an empty cage.

The coding is used as a control for an algorithmic compositional strategy of acoustic data. A custom-built software translates the waves recorded into musical sounds broadcast in the exhibition space, and the sound thus generated represents a real-time mapping of the emotions felt by the performer.

I'd also like to recommend the catalog that accompanies the exhibition as a way to explore the subject. It's in fact a carefully selection of essays by neurologists, philosophers, anthropologists, art historian, and the curators who present with the peculiar perspective of their own discipline the rationality of emotions and, in David Freedberg's words, the "relations between the formal aspects of an image and the emotional responses" of the user.

More images on flickr and CCCS.

Yves Netzhammer, The Subjectivisation of Repetition, 2007

Christian Nold, Emotional Mapping San Francisco, 2007